3 ms·

Well it was also one of the first portable OS's and being able to write programs in C vs. assembly for a particular architecture really helped it take off. I'm

• mhurron 12y ago
  > I'm not sure that "free" was a big deal when the machines themselves cost so much It was for the hardware manufacturers who now didn't need to produce a whole new OS for their hardware. It also was for the universities who could play with the OS without astronomical OS licensing costs. After that, the former could take advantage of so many of the latter coming out of school with UNIX experience.
• sliverstorm 12y ago
  Ah, but while that was definitely part of the success, the reason portability was even interesting, was because it was free ;) You note yourself that the machines came "free" with their own software- Unix would have (at first) had a hard time competing with the bundled OS if it was not free. In which case it would not have spread beyond the PDP-11. You might argue the machines are so expensive that "price is no object", but the major consumers of early Unix were (if memory serves) Universities.